When founders and employees at young New York company DigitalOcean opened a few bottles of Armand de Brignac champagne a couple of weeks ago, it wasn’t just to celebrate a $37.2 million investment by one of Silicon Valley’s major firms. They were toasting how far they’d come.

Before raising one of the largest Series A rounds of any software company in recent years, the Web-hosting services startup had gotten rejected by the first incubator program it tried to enter. And when it set out to raise its Series A round, it met with a lot of blank stares.

“We spoke with every ‘Tier 1’ VC. They were all afraid to take a big bet,” said Ben Uretsky, founder and chief executive of the company.

Here is Mr. Uretsky speaking with Venture Capital Dispatch about how DigitalOcean will spend its new capital.

DigitalOcean’s founders, brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky, as well as Mitch Wainer and Jeff Carr, released the first version of their Web-hosting product in early 2012, to about a hundred customers. They met many of the initial customers at the New York Tech Meetup, Ben Uretsky said.

They waded into a space populated by large players Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which have been offering customers the chance to tap into cloud-based servers, instead of purchasing their own. The move toward cloud servers in large part stimulated the proliferation of startups around the world over the past few years, as these servers dramatically cut down the cost of creating new software, new applications and new companies.

But DigitalOcean’s founders saw that for individual programmers, the process of setting up a virtual server was often complicated and sometimes slow. They decided to offer an alternative.

The idea, Mr. Uretsky said, has been brewing for some time. He purchased the domain DigitalOcean.com in 2008 for $3,000, he said.

In 2012 the founders applied to join the New York program run by the accelerator Techstars. They were rejected. The founders were then invited to apply to the Boulder, Colo., based Techstars program and got in.

There they experimented with trying different business models and product ideas, but eventually returned to the original idea, Mr. Uretsky said. (The stay in Boulder was productive, he said, but costly. They took a $100,000 convertible note from investors affiliated with Techstars that they burned on living expenses.)

They returned to New York. Mr. Uretsky and his brother grew up there, after immigrating with their family as young children from Russia, as part of the large influx of Jewish immigrants.

DigitalOcean founders tried to raise a $500,000 seed round after they returned from Boulder. But the deal was taking a long time. By the time investors were ready to sign, the founders refused, said Mr. Uretsky. The company decided to boostrap and raise a larger, more solid round.

That came in the summer of 2013, when DigitalOcean got $3.2 million in seed funds from IA Ventures and Crunchfund.

That DigitalOcean is a New York company may have contributed to its developing a unique perspective on the business of Web infrastructure, unlike the conventional wisdom prevalent in Silicon Valley, said Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s Series A round announced this week.

“The conventional wisdom is that we have to appeal to enterprise customers,” Mr. Levine said. “There are a lot of companies that want to focus on large companies, to help move their operations out to the cloud…What was unconventional [about DigitalCloud is] the focus around a purpose-built cloud for developers. That was not obvious,” he said. He added, “Being in a different place helps you see things differently.”

The past year has been all about meeting demand — adding servers and people.

Along with the open champagne bottles with their golden Ace of Spades logo that decorate the company’s Lower Manhattan office, visitors can also see a visible mark on the floor, where the company recently tore down a wall to make room for expansion.

With the large funding in place, the startup plans to double its team of 50, Mr. Uretsky said. It might have to turn to the West Coast for some of the talent, he said.

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